averycover.gifWhen Fire Records in the U.K. announced they were going to be re-releasing Neutral Milk Hotel’s first album, On Avery Island, with bonus tracks, there was considerable excitement (and, on my part, considerable blogging). A few months back it was revealed that the reissue’s bonus tracks were going to be limited to “Everything Is” and “Snow Song Pt. 1,” two tracks that are widely available elsewhere. (In fact, if you buy the Everything Is single Orange Twin released, it contains two additional tracks, “Aunt Eggma Blowtorch” and, from the Hype City cassette, “Tuesday Moon.”) After being pushed back for over a year, this reissue will be released on November 12. The Fire Records page for this release has the following quote from Jeff Mangum on the album’s creation:

The album was recorded in Denver with Robert Schneider from The Apples In Stereo. Robert’s a friend I met in second grade, we must have been about eight years old at the time. It was January in Denver, freezing cold and snowing all over. I moved into a friend’s house and was living in a closet and it was cold, not only because of the weather but because it was a haunted house. The closet I was living in was haunted. The person that lived in the house kept having dreams of people having cocktail parties in my closet, there would always be these really beautiful women in really tacky fur coats drinking champagne and telling my friend that we should get the fuck out of their party because we were really pissing them off… So I lived in my closet and listened to a lot of John Coltrane and waited about a month to start recording. Robert and I would get stuck on something when we were recording and walk around and grab our heads and get really frustrated, go outside and have a cigarette and go to the store, and then we’d suddenly hit on something and we’d jump up and down and hug each other. The whole album just blurs in a beautiful way to me, like a dream, because I guess my whole life the past three years has been geared towards the end which is the album itself. It’s sort of the culmination of the whole experience.

Pretty cool.